I'll start by confessing something shameful. When I was sending my first and then second, and then third and fourth novels to publishers – and having publishers send them back – there was one particular editor who must have seen some talent in what she read. The way she tried to encourage me was this: instead of just sending me a formula rejection letter, she would invite me to come to her office where, over the course of a half-hour conversation, it would become clear that, no, she wasn't going to publish this one either, but that she still thought I should keep writing. What she was publishing – I learnt because they soon started arriving in the bookshop where I worked – were reprints of JG Ballard's short story collections: The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, Vermillion Sands. I remember thinking, as I placed these shiny paperbacks on the shelf, "Why's she bothering with this old guy? She should be publishing me." At that point, of course, I had hardly read anything by the old guy.It's best to get this out of the way, because it was about the only time I ever thought anything negative about Ballard, either as a writer or a man. Instead, over the years, he'd become the closest thing I had to a living role model. Henry James is fine, but he doesn't help you to deal with the violence and velocity of the contemporary world. And it was violence and velocity I was after when I wrote Corpsing, my second novel. On completing it, I felt the influence of Ballard was so obvious that it had better be acknowledged – so I put Ballard's great novel Crash in the acknowledgements. It was my first attempt at a thank you.Crash, it seems to me, is the high-point of Ballard's writing – where his style is at its most brilliant, where his social focus is most acute. I know others will disagree. His early novels – The Drowned World particularly – have their own mesmeric power. He was, from the beginning, a great short story writer. And he reached another kind of exploratory high-point in The Atrocity Exhibition – not only for himself, but also for English literary fiction. Respectable English writers just don't do that kind of extremity, perversity, absurdity.But Ballard did.And I wanted to.